Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its global e-commerce network.
Amazon Simple Storage Service, widely known as Amazon S3, is a highly scalable, fast, and durable solution for object-level storage of any data type. Unlike the operating systems we are all used to, Amazon S3 does not store files in a file system, instead it stores files as objects. Object Storage allows users to upload files, videos, and documents like you were to upload files, videos, and documents to popular cloud storage products like Dropbox and Google Drive. This makes Amazon S3 very flexible and platform agnostic.
How S3 Works?
Amazon S3 is an object storage service, which differs from block and file cloud storage. Each object is stored as a file with its metadata included and is given an ID number. Applications use this ID number to access an object. Unlike file and block cloud storage, a developer can access an object via a REST API.
There are two different kinds of metadata. System-Defined and User-Defined Metadata. System metadata is used for S3 to maintain important things such as creation date, size, and last-modified.
Objects also take in user-defined metadata. User-defined metadata allows users to assign key-value pairs to the data they upload. These key-value pairs help users identify, organize, and assign objects to specific resources, or allow for easy retrieval.
The S3 cloud storage service gives a subscriber access to the same systems that Amazon uses to run its own websites. S3 enables customers to upload, store and download practically any file or object that is up to five terabytes (TB) in size, with the largest single upload capped at five gigabytes (GB).
Advantage of Amazon S3
Amazon S3 has some unique benefits as an object storage service as compared to traditional file or block storage. Some major advantages of using Amazon S3 include durability, security, and reliability. Per Amazon’s documentation, Amazon S3 provides customers with a 99.999999999% rate of durability.
AWS S3 redundantly stores your data across multiple devices spanning at least three AZs (Availability Zones) in an S3 Region.
Features of Amazon S3
S3 provides 99.999999999% durability for objects stored in the service and supports multiple security and compliance certifications. An administrator can also link S3 to other AWS security and monitoring services, including CloudTrail, CloudWatch and Macie. There's also an extensive partner network of vendors that link their services directly to S3.
Data can be transferred to S3 over the public internet via access to S3 APIs. There's also Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration for faster movement over long distances, as well as AWS Direct Connect for a private, consistent connection between S3 and an enterprise's own data center. An administrator can also use AWS Snowball, a physical transfer device, to ship large amounts of data from an enterprise data center directly to AWS, which will then upload it to S3.
users can integrate other AWS services with S3. For example, an analyst can query data directly on S3 either with Amazon Athena for ad hoc queries or with Amazon Redshift Spectrum for more complex analyses.
Users are also able to take advantage of other S3 features as below :
- The ability to write, read, and delete objects from 1 byte to 5 terabytes.
- Unlimited number of objects.
- Authentication mechanisms provided to allow authentication and deny unauthorized access from outside users.
- REST and SOAP API interfaces.
- Simplicity in managing data by segregating data by buckets, monitoring access, and controlling data life-cycles.
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